Diacritics in search function case sensitive

Question

I have a search function in my Django app:

#search
def search(request):
    if request.method == "POST":
        searched = request.POST['searched']
        result = Post.objects.filter(title__contains=searched)
        return render(request, 'blog/searched.html', {'searched':searched, 'result':result})
    else:
        return render(request, 'blog/searched.html',{})

Problem is, when I search the following, I get the following results:

Zaštita -> I get 'Zaštita' result
zaštita -> I get 'Zaštita' result
Čep -> I get 'Čep' result
čep -> I get nothing (diacritic letter in the first place, case sensitive)

Only if diacritic letter in the first place the search is case sensitive.

Input page HTML:

<div class="content-section">
              <form class="d-flex" method=POST action="{% url 'search' %}">
                {% csrf_token %}
                <input class="form-control me-2 mr-2" type="search" placeholder="Title" aria-label="Search" name="searched">
                <button class="btn btn-outline-secondary" type="submit">Search</button>
              </form>
          </div>

Answer 1

You can use the __icontains lookup ^[Django-doc] to make a case insenstive search. Normally searching is however done through a GET request: POST requests are usually used for state-changing actions, or when submitting sensitive data.

You thus can search with:

def search(request):
    searched = request.GET.get('searched')
    result = Post.objects.all()
    if searched is not None:
        result = result.filter(title__icontains=searched)
    return render(request, 'blog/searched.html', {'searched':searched, 'result':result})

---

Note: While using the __icontains lookup ^[Django-doc] produces results for text, this often is still a poor way to search, since it will only fetch items with the exact string. Usually one uses solutions like Elastic or Solr, or one can uses PostgreSQL's __search lookup ^[Django-doc].